The major components

So how’s Houston working? Here is an overview of the major components. Houston is a distributed system composed of:

Two Mobile Apps that fulfill the specific need of bus drivers and team leaders

A Web Client used by the operators to create any type of call

A Cloud Communication Platform to establish Voice over IP (VoIP) and standard phone call over the Public Switch Telephone Network (PSTN) without having to deal with the complexity of building and maintaining a communication infrastructure. The cloud platform used in this system is Twilio (more details on that later)

A Public API: implemented by a backend server used as a bridge between mobile apps, web clients and Twilio. It is connected to a database that stores user identities and bus planning. The database also keeps traces of all performed calls.

A deeper look inside each component of the system and how each of them interacts together will help to understand why Houston was a huge challenge.

Bring your company radio system to the 21st century using VoIP and mobile applications to improve communication quality while reducing costs.

With the project Houston, we took the challenge of replacing the old radio network of the Transports Publics Fribourgeois (TPF), a swiss public transportation company by a system using existing data network and running on mobile applications. This solution solved the problem of maintaining a dedicated radio network. It also improved both the global quality of the communication and the availability of the system.

Initial situation: communication based on radio system

Since decades, employees of the Transports Publics Fribourgeois (TPF) have been using standard radio to communicate between them. The radio system is meant to cover the needs of the users. It is spread over more than 200 busses, 30 team leaders and the operation center). There are three types of users, with specific needs:

The operators – working in the operation center – use the radio to speak to a specific bus driver, or to broadcast messages to all or part of the running busses.

The team leaders are dispatched at different locations. They use the radio to manage daily events – such as the replacement of a driver – or to inform many drivers of a change in the network – for example in case of an accident.

The bus drivers use the bus radio as the main means of communication while driving. They can call other busses, the team leaders or the operation center.

How can mobile applications support industries to undertake a digital transformation? In supply chain, risk management, or information distribution, mobile applications will make tasks easier for your employees, thus increasing efficiency. Read about 5 industrial challenges that mobile apps can solve.

First of all, it is important to carefully chose between a web and a mobile application. Mobile apps are useful when they use one of the device’s native capabilities (e.g. Bluetooth, GPS, camera, etc.), and when they enhance the experience provided to the user (compared to what a web application could do).

Industrial challenges

The challenges industries face are often very good candidates for mobile apps as they leverage all their potential. Therefore, I have identified five recurring issues that industries are facing nowadays. These pain points can be easily relieved by mobile applications.

This blog post offers an overview and PDF download of the data stack, thus all tools that might be needed for data collection, processing, storage, analysis and finally integrated business intelligence solutions.

(Web)-Developers are used to stacks, most prominent among them probably the LAMP Stack or more current the MEAN stack. On the other hand, I have not heard too many data scientists talking about so much about data stacks – may it because we think, that in a lot of cases all you need is some python a CSV, pandas, and scikit-learn to do the job.

But when we sat down recently with our team, I realized that we indeed use a myriad of different tools, frameworks, and SaaS solutions. I thought it would be useful to organize them in a meaningful data stack. I have not only included the tools we are using, but I sat down and started researching. It turned out into an extensive list aka. the data stack PDF. This poster will:

provide an overview of solutions available in the 5 layers (Sources, Processing, Storage, Analysis, Visualization)

In this article I will show you in 3 easy steps how to actually get started with an IoT a project build with a particle photon and a node.js server in order to have your own dashboard. I admit, IoT is a bit of a trend these days, and yes I jumped on the bandwaggon too. But since visiting the maker faire Zürich I have seen so many enthousiastic people building things, it has also motived me to also try out something. Thats why I decided to count the people that are running up and down our stairs at Liip. Follow along if you are – like me – a total noob when it comes to connecting wires but still want to experience the fun of building IoT devices.